


Time, Courage, Memory

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), The Hour
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2019-04-30 20:38:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14505012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: Three Lix and Randall Doctor Who AUs





	1. Chapter 1

1\. The _Valiant_ was said to be impenetrable, but Lix bluffed her way onto the Master’s fortress in the sky using little more than her press pass and stubborn determination. She promised her work to the propaganda machine. She insisted that she only cared about getting the pictures, about capturing this pivotal moment in human–no, galactic!–history for posterity. She showed him her portfolio: photograph after photograph of masterful inspiration; massive devotional statues watching over Earth’s plains and touched by the light of its sun, sparkling avenues devoid of crime, industrious manufacturing workers labouring at jobs they thought they’d lost forever. He told her she reminded him of someone he’d known once, a long time ago, someone who had believed the moral right of the work lay in the doing of it. Someone ruthless who cared about the work above all else. Never did it occur to him that if she could photograph the statue, she could photograph the rocket farm. If she could access the labourers, she could access their production lines.

2\. She infiltrated the _Valiant_ because of Randall. He was one of the two percent who were immune to Archangel. Like the Master, he would tap out its rhythms, because unlike most of humanity, he could hear the pattern their alien conqueror was broadcasting over the world. He’d known all along that Harold Saxon was dangerous, had urged Vivien Rook to meet with Mrs. Saxon on the pretense of a fashion feature. In the year following Toclafane contact, he ran an underground press, channelled intelligence for the resistance, established a safe house in Paris for the network of support for Martha Jones. Lix wasn’t immune to Archangel and what it had become, but that year they watched cities die, they watched capricious slaughter, they watched their world collapse around them for what seemed to be nothing more than spite, and when Randall said we can fight, we must fight, Lix trusted him and drowned her fear and _fought_.

3\. That year, in spite of all the death and the underground battle for their lives and their ravaged planet, Lix and Randall had a baby. When the paradox machine failed, they were caught on the _Valiant_ but Sophia was on the Earth below. All around them, time rewound, history came undone, the horrors of the past year unwritten. And they picked themselves up and knew that erased with it all was their daughter, new and fragile and beloved, born of a hell that never was; and they told themselves that there was always a price, and looking around at the survivors around them (heroes, every one), they knew they weren’t the only ones to pay it, and for what they had saved, what they had preserved, they’d live with the memory of what they had lost.

4\. Nevertheless, Lix began to forget. They saw their planet stolen for a Dalek war. They saw an ancient world hang red and screaming in their sky. They watched the sun that was not a star explode in slow motion. The dead came climbing out of their graves to become killing machines and for one unhinged, hopeful, dreadful moment they imagined their own dead among them. Sometimes they almost perished in the calamities; sometimes one or the other or both did. But these things were too big to hold in the memory, and besides, Lix wanted to forget. Because at the core of it all was the pain of what she’d been–and would always be–willing to give up. Only Randall’s persistent reminders stopped her from slipping away into merciful oblivion. Only Randall’s hand in hers tethered her to the reasons for the grief she couldn’t shake. And what did Randall want? Could he have chosen to forget, if he had had the choice? Would he have asked to return to the normal flow of time, if they had only known who to ask?

5\. And then, one day, a decade after the year that never was, Lix met a person with Randall’s face who wasn’t Randall. And she realised that she knew him, remembered the same sad compassionate eyes with the surprising sparkle and the craving for forgiveness (how they all craved forgiveness). And it was a long time before she could explain herself, because he made it easy not to, filling the pauses, always running. But while she understood escape, she wasn’t sure she could run: “Too old, too slow,” she said. “You’re never too old,” he countered, but she was a journalist, she investigated, and a few questions was all it took to find out who he’d travelled with before. Her conclusion: “ _You’re_ never too old.” Still, for a while, she played along. They salvaged an alien peace conference, they midwifed the birth of a new species, they cried “¡No pasarán!” in Madrid in 1936. Until finally, finally, when he caught her leaning out the TARDIS doors with a cigarette and a bottle of whiskey (after the ire and the terrifying, hypocritical thunder), she’d told him about the one place they could never visit, the one person they could never see, the child who only existed in a branch of time that had had to be destroyed. And he understood. 

Meanwhile, at about the same moment, Randall, too, met a time traveller they’d once known; and she loved, just _loved_ the idea of reopening an old paradox…


	2. Chapter 2

1\. Lix’s “fob watch” is a camera. But she has a lot of cameras, and if this particular one (a hobby Leica) escapes use time and again, she, out of necessity, has programmed herself not to notice. So it hangs, small, forgotten, a sentimental keepsake, a blind eye, the cap tight over the lens.

2\. Was it resonance, was it some form of self-excoriation that drew her to civil war Spain? She’d been an objector in a war in which it wasn’t acceptable to object, in a society in which it wasn’t possible to deviate. She’s been erased and rewritten, killed and regenerated, and in the final, forgotten cycle, incited a minor rebellion that could have succeeded a hundred thousand times and still been crushed with a simple computer command. In the end, she’d run away, choosing to overwrite herself rather than surrender to the generals for their war machine again.

“Lix Storm” is a dream, a reverie, a woman who survives intact to the core. She isn’t afraid of the front line. She gets the word out, every time. She knows how to love. She knows how to have a good time. She lives life intensely, uncloistered, uncollared, free.

3\. The woman who has the baby is human. The Time Lady who loses her is not. No one takes Sophia to Paris. No one adopts her into a human family. There’s no compassionate French couple, no air raid, no body in the rubble. There’s only a camera full of gold dust in place of silver halide, a voice whispering eternities, and Randall’s unstoppable curiosity. When Lix uncaps the camera, she destroys not simply the invented life, but Randall’s, also, and Sophia’s. For what was she going to do, a Time Lady with an Earth-born baby? A stranger in her own strange fantasy.

She tries. For a while. They make it work. For a while. Then the Time Lords come, and they take the child, and for punishment they leave her behind. They strand her, fully cognizant of what she has done, what she has lost, what she’ll never have.

4\. It is, of course, beyond her capacity to endure. 

But–she reasons–Lix Storm could endure it. Lix Storm is strong. Lix Storm, with her human flexibility, her human coping mechanisms, is better equipped to live with grief, to assimilate tragedy. She makes Randall promise to keep their secret. This time, to let her sleep. She reconfigures the camera to hinge on the back of the case, and she locks herself in like a shadow on the film.

To Lix, though, this is at most a waking dream. She has no knowledge of the refugee hiding behind her eyes. She knows only this life and the pain of this life. The story invented to cover the story. Everybody bears a wound, and what of it? When it hurts too much, there’s whisky.

Meanwhile, dust gathers on the lens.

5\. When is it Randall decides he’s had enough? How many times does he dream of a girl bathed in gold, how often does he wake in the dark blinking away the blast of light before he wonders whether he’s seeing his child fighting to survive in an alien war? He’d thought he could stay with Lix, help her and guard her secret, but he’d proved himself a poor companion. He’d abandoned her, too afraid of his own weakness, and he hated himself for it.

It’s easy to put himself back into her life. Easy to find the camera that would open the possibility of answers. But what’s hard, what has him raging in his office when no one’s looking, is the exchange he realises he would have to make: between the chance of finding Sophia and the certainty of losing Lix.


	3. Chapter 3

1\. They traveled together in a TT capsule, a Type 40, brand new. She, who might have walked the placid corridors of power, wanted nothing to do with the governance of her House or the business of the Council. He was a funny one, never still, always leaving a trail of unease in the mental commons of collective consensus. So they were sent away, on a task suited to their aberrant natures. They were observers, assigned to study wars that might teach them something about their own war, the one they had been told was coming. They were meant to be impartial; they were never meant to interfere.  


Time Lords don’t, except when they do.  


2\. The sky was alien, pale, but the sea was worse, an endlessly running and restless body of mineralised water, silver as a forest, glints of light chasing across its surface, piscine and nimble as though with laughter. Always in motion. Always breaking itself apart and putting itself together again. It soothed something in him, but she felt drawn to higher ground, thinner air. In the city on the plateau, she felt better closer to the funny little sun, so it was there they made their base while the humans learned to drop bombs on themselves. It was there they learned about listening for the engine drone and the whistle, about rubble and chaos, about civilian casualties and absolute conflicts, but also about how to survive, how to find hope, how to make something to live for.

3\. They made something to live for.

4\. Time Lords don’t interfere. Except when they do. It was one person saved, one piece of art, one condemned prisoner, one carload of friends. The child changed everything, and the child changed nothing. A baby wailing in the street looked so much like their own. They told themselves not everything was a fixed point. They told themselves they would recognise the nodes and leave them alone. 

By the time the CIA came for them, they already knew they’d gone too far. He ran, and she retreated, and the child, the child they left behind, a year old, nameless but for the one carved into the wooden cradle in an unreadable circular script. Secret, hidden, almost human.

5\. The Timeless Child was one name they would use, the Abandoned, the Outcast. Just barely, grudgingly claimed by a Chapter that didn’t want the blemish but couldn’t denounce the burden. They’d snatched the tot from an air raid—a Time Lord, after all, isn’t human, ought to be brought up by Time Lords, not humans—and they recalled the TARDIS, too, mothballed it and let it gather dust. Until one day, that child, grown, wandered into the maintenance bays, and went looking for the blue sky, and the sea, and the people who could be home.


End file.
